16 May 2023
One of the consequences of Joyce's recent wellness visit was to take a sleep test. Yesterday we drove over to the French campus of Kaiser on Sixth Ave. in our old neighborhood to pick up a WatchPAT.
The WatchPAT is a device that you wear one night as you sleep at home. There are three parts: a sensor you stick on your test (like those EKG sensors) attached to a watch-like monitor with a wrist strap that is also plugged into a finger probe (a bit larger than a oximeter).
You put it on when you hit the sack and once everything is in place, you press a button on the watch-like device until the screen lights up. It does a test to make sure it can read the sensors and you go to sleep.
In the morning, you simply take it off and put it back in its box. Later we'll drop it off at Kaiser in a special drop-off box that looks like mailbox.
It measures a number of things including your actual sleep time, respiratory disturbances, apnea-hypopnea, blood oxygen, sleep pulse, snoring, body position and sleep stage statistics.
And if sleep apnea is diagnosed, she'll be prescribed a CPAP machine, which forces oxygen into your lungs through your mouth and nose as you sleep.
And, as you might imagine, she had an unusually quiet night. I think she may even have been awake much of the time. I did hear one snore, though.
I hope that's enough to tell us something.